Sig Christenson: GIs hanging tough

We’ve talked about the Army’s problems keeping captains in uniform, particularly West Point graduates who have a world of options thanks to having a degree that opens doors to graduate schools and Fortune 500 companies.

Col. Ted Martin knows the issue well. A West Point man himself on his third tour of Iraq, he’s says there are three kinds of captains he counsels in his 4th Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade, now posted in Baghdad.

But he also sees a bigger picture beyond the never-ending struggle to keep enough of them in uniform to provide leaders for today and tomorrow. That picture is brighter, and even exciting in his mind. More about that in a moment.

“Usually I just listen to them, see what’s on their mind. And there is this repetitive theme, ‘I’m married, or ‘I can’t find a girlfriend so I’m never going to get married’; ‘If I stay here it’s (another) deployment and when I redeploy I get 90 days and then I start right back into the training cycle.’ And you know, that was true, and that was really super-focused during the time of the surge. I mean, that made life tough, it made life tough for a lot of people,” Martin , 47 and formerly of Jacksonville Beach, Fla., said in his office at Forward Operating Base Falcon in Baghdad.

“So we have those people that become disgruntled. The Army’s not what they dreamed it would be, so they may have come in thinking they want to be careerists, then they can’t see far enough down the road that there is light at the end of the tunnel. I think between 2003 and 2008, those five years probably would be the toughest five years for soldiers in the Army now. Even the folks who were fighting in (the) World War II European Theater 11 months from D-Day to end of mission, tremendous numbers of people were killed and wounded there. Here it is a steady trickle of casualties. It is probably the same mental effect as large numbers of casualties.”

Sad? Yes. But Martin, who has lived through the worst of the insurgency, also sees an upside.

“One byproduct of that is it builds such a tight, cohesive team. It’s incredible. You see young 18-year-old kids walk out of a chapel after a memorial service, climb right into a Bradley Fighting Vehicle and roll downtown for more of the same and they are hard, they are hard. You would be proud of what you see. And they’re proud because the squads and the platoons are very tight. That’s something being built over here that we’re going to reap the benefits of for a long time, and that’s cohesive units that know how to live under duress for a long time and function.”

This is a much different Army from the one that crossed into Iraq on March 20, 2003. It is the kind of Army that will be needed if the United States is indeed fighting a “long war” against terrorism that some believe will last decades.

Right now it is a very good Army, even if it is tired of multiple deployments to Iraq. And it is still quite motivated.

“Yeah, you can’t help but get tired over here. But my re-enlistment rate is over 100 percent and I closed out first week of August, two months early. Everybody I have in the unit is a volunteer. Nobody was drafted here. Everybody had the opportunity to leave the service with a few exceptions – the captains, you know some captains that were caught under stop-loss. They were just a handful,” he said. “Everybody knows exactly what they’re getting into. They’re volunteering for this and their families are well cared for back home. I think that makes a big difference.”